Antonio:
Sustainable tourism is for us, as is all sustainability. We were one of the first municipalities in Portugal to use the SDGs. We have been in an URBACT group about sustainable tourism. This summer we had contact from the world tourism organisation to write about our work on this.
Braga is now in a middle term, because we don’t have mass tourism, but we are increasing year by year, very rapidly. We want to integrate our people in the city to understand the benefit of tourism – this is the main concern right now.
We are at a point where we can manage the city, the location of new hotels.
Louis:
The URBACT network gave us an insight about how we could work together with all of the stakeholders in our city to create sustainable tourism. We built an urban local group that gave us insights about what the city needed. We made an action plan for sustainable tourism. It’s very important for us to work this issue in the long term. Sustainability is everything and it’s nothing. It’s a complex issue. But we’re going in a good direction and we want to work on this further. The municipality has the capacity to sensitise all the stakeholders.
Antonio:
Every sector about tourism, universities, hotels, restaurants, cafes, tour operators, transportation, everyone who is in the trade of tourism is involved in our decision making.
This was good not only because of the suggestions, especially during the pandemic, but also allowing them to network with each other. Because many of them work in tourism but don’t have the opportunity to engage with each other. This is an opportunity for them to network and create new programmes with each other and improve their businesses.
Louis:
It was difficult to bring the most important stakeholders together and do something that would bring respect to the municipality and manage constructive work. They shared ideas and told us what we needed to do. So our action plan followed those measures.
We have a lot of good political leadership. It’s crucial for us to achieve this. Something that the group suggested that was good for us to work on was interpretive signs for more guidance. That’s something we have but we need to improve more.
One measure was the tourist tax. That’s something that gives us numbers to work on – we know what kind of tourism is taking place here, and we can reduce our tourism footprint. We are not at the point of overtourism, but last August was crazy, it outreached the capacity of the city. I work in the tourist office and I can honestly say I had to send people to other cities because we didn’t have enough hotels.
For the tourist tax, the major hotels don’t mind it because they are used to it. Local business owners are a bit more sceptical about it, like it’s just another tax. But we made the case that we need to spend on tourism, so we need to tax it. And tourism creates a lot of tourism. We only apply the tourist tax between March and the end of September. In the low season we don’t apply the tax, only the high season.
We have an app that we can measure and it has some heat signs that we can see where tourists are and we can direct them to different places. It’s in a test phase now.
Antonio:
We also made a canditure to the national recovery plan programme on commerce and tourism digitalisatoin in public squares, so we are waiting for about €2 million to increase monitors in the city and apps to see and manage where people are, also looking at the phones to know the nationality. This will start in the centre and be enlarged to other parts of the city.
We have many undiscovered places, even places unknown by locals, like sightseeing landscape places. Also we have the river beaches that we are improving, which are very unknown. Many of these places are natural places, so it’s important to lead people there. They are not so known and not so visited. We are working on that with a tourism gamification app that focuses on natural places. We also have a lot of little local restaurants, many treasures that are very hidden and very nice. You can come here five, six, seven times and have a different experience. You might come to Braga because of an event, or for religious tourism and patrimony, or for natural tourism. We are also very near many other parts of Portugal, so we encourage people to come and stay here and visit our neighbours and then return to us for the night – this is part of our strategy.
Louis:
In our Urban group we did a small scale action in the city. Through Facebook and some other channels we invited all the people in Braga to live the city like a tourist, in order to sensitise them to how tourists feel the city. Some people think tourism is a bad thing, some people think that tourism is a good thing, so for us was something to see how local businesses and residents perceived tourism, and try to build ways of cocreating tourism experiences, and to improve local knowledge of the perception of value of tourism related heritage and to raise the awareness of sustainability in tourism related practices, and we also introduced the theme of people with disabilities that should also be included in this group. This is something that we are proud of. People came to us and they felt like they were tourists in their own city. We provided them a guided tour of Braga, along with information about sustainability.